Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Flickr vs the secret robot army (or, Task 5 + 6 )

I wouldn't want you to think that the real title of this blog is Where have all the good men gone? Or that I'm using work resources to write a frivolous blog about dancing, movie stars and mood swings. Oh no. There is a Grand Plan.

It's just that I seem to have come across a power greater even than the secret robot army (curses!) The mighty forces of the web are against me. Every time I hunker down in the Secret Lab, ready to explore the latest online technology, everything starts to work v e r r y s l o w l y . . . .

Picture the scene: Paranoia in the lab, committed to taking a tour of the photo sharing website Flickr.

The mosaic business was decidedly unthrilling. Like Montager it lets you make mosaics of photos. Yay.

Flickr graph that mapped social relationships sounds like it could have been a useful tool for knowledge management. But I will never know.

Mappr sounds like the goods but I couldn't get onto the site. It lets you map photos with geographic tags. I thought this could be good for local historyish projects. Or is you wanted to map the scenes from Godzilla movies.The only thing I did get to see properly were the librarian trading cards. And they were just a bit, well, librarianish. Trading card maker is a tool that lets you upload images to make your own trading card or even a whole deck of playing cards. I think the librarians should have made a set of ninja trading cards. All 52 would look identical: a black shadow. A hilarious scheme!Ah the dilemma for the library world. We want to be doing fancy things with new technologies. We want to take advantage of these exciting opportunities to offer services in new ways. But we have to be old school, new school and future school all at once. Many of us are sitting at the internet waiting waiting waiting for a page that is never going to load. Ever. Grrr.Godzilla thinks so too.

1 comment:

Totally agree about libraries becoming all things to technologies...(This may be a task for the "Secret Robot Army" but godzilla could probably handle it!). There must be a tranquill place in all this for a gentle soul? Bye the way, I love your postings. Fred, ginger and orson have long been my favorite cliche's